Chapter VI: The Red Rover Gets the Breaks

Drew Lane entered his room at three o’clock that morning. He and Tom Howe occupied a room together in the Hotel Starling. It was a very large place. Their room was on the top floor.

Throwing his coat over a chair he sank into a place by a table in the corner and allowing his head to drop on his arm tried to collect his thoughts. He had been following clues. A reporter from the News had given him a “hot tip” that grew cold almost at once. Casey from the State Street Police Station had given him another. It had led to nothing. After that he had begun setting traps. Calling in three trusted stool-pigeons, he had laid out their tasks for them. Having consulted his chief, he had begun laying plans for raiding all known hang-outs for kidnaping gangs. After that he had picked up a copy of the city’s pink sheet and had read in glaring headlines:

GHOST NO LONGER WALKS. HE GALLOPS.

He had read with some surprise the story of the Galloping Ghost.

“Rotten bit of sensation,” he muttered. “I saw no ghost. Don’t believe Howe did either. But that shot? Who fired it?”

He glanced at Howe’s bed in the corner. Howe lay across it fully clad, sound asleep.

“Like to ask him,” Drew muttered. “Like—”

He made a sudden move with his arm. Some unusually hard object rested beneath it.

To his surprise he found on the table a coarse brown envelope. On the face of it was scrawled:

_Sergeants Lane and Howe._

Turning it over, he dumped its contents upon the table. A handful of shavings and one very misshapen bullet, that was all; or so he thought until he thrust in a hand and drew forth a much crumpled bit of paper.

With a quick intake of breath, he flattened the paper on the table.

Words were scrawled across the page. The writing was very bad, as if a right-handed man had undertaken to write with his left hand. In time he made out the message.

_Here are some important clues. Guard them with care. When raids are made you will collect firearms. Collect pocket knives as well. You will hear from me later._

“_The G.G._”

“Some crank,” Drew muttered.

Then a thought struck him all of a heap. How had the message gotten into their room?

“Howe brought it.

“No. That is impossible. Had he read that note he would have folded it neatly. That’s Howe every time.”

Well, here was fresh mystery. And what of these clues? A bullet. That was always important. But where had it been found? He examined it closely. “Wood sticking to it,” he muttered. “Been dug out.”

But what of the shavings? These too he examined. After studying them carefully he was convinced that some one, while waiting for a second person perhaps, had occupied his time whittling a bit of soft wood he had picked up.

“The world is strewn with such piles made by whittle-bugs,” he told himself. He was tempted to toss them into the waste paper basket. Instead he slid them back into the envelope.

After that he read the note through again. “Collect pocket knives.” His voice took on a note of disgust. “What could be the good of that?”

“‘You will hear from me again.’ Well, here’s hoping.”

He threw the envelope to a back corner of the table. But startling revelations would drag it again to the light.

“Collect pocket knives.” Down deep in his heart he knew that he would start this collection to-morrow. He hated doing silly things. But more than this he dreaded making fatal blunders. “A clue is a clue,” he had said many times, “be it faint as a moon at midday.”

* * * * * * * *

The battle Red Rodgers waged after leaving the cabin at the edge of the narrow clearing on that mysterious island was something quite outside his past experience. True, he was not unacquainted with struggle and peril. More than once in the vast steel mill he had watched hot sheet steel, caught by a defective roller, curl itself into a serpent of fire, and had dodged in the nick of time. On the gridiron, with mad crowds screaming, with forms leaping at him from right and left, he had over and over battled his way to victory.

Now he faced neither man-made steel nor man himself, but nature. Before him in the dark lay a primeval wilderness; a small wilderness, to be sure, but a real one for all that. Here, on a rocky ridge scarcely one hundred yards wide, for ages without number trees had fought a battle to the death.

He had not gone a dozen paces when he tripped and fell.

He felt ashamed that the girl must put out a slender hand to guide him. “I—I’ve never been in a forest,” he half apologized.

“Not even by day?” The girl’s awed whisper showed her astonishment. Her next remark gave him a shock. “Then you have never truly lived.”

Gladly would he have argued this point. But this was no time for mere talk. It was a time for action. They were on an island within a bay. The bay reached far, to a larger island. The larger island was far from the mainland. If the kidnaper’s statement was to be accepted, there were no people on this larger island save the kidnapers themselves.

“I wonder if there are other cabins on this island?” He whispered this more to himself than to the girl. She answered nevertheless.

“There are none. We must get away as far as we can. To the far end of the island. Then we must think what is to be done next. Come, we must go. Follow close behind me.”

For a full half hour after that they waged a silent battle with nature. Over fallen trees that now tore at them with their tangled branches and now sank treacherously beneath their feet, around rocky ridges that offered dangerous descents into tiny valleys so dark that one might not see his hand before him, they struggled on until with a sigh the girl whispered:

“A trail.”

Too engrossed was Red in the unaccustomed struggle to ask: “What has made this trail?”

He was soon enough to know. In his pocket he carried a small flashlight. Judging that they were now far enough from the cabin to use this, he pressed the button, then cast the light down the trail.

Instantly he sprang back. The light was reflected by a pair of large and burning eyes.

A confused impression of brown hair, of antlers like spiked slabs of wood, and those burning eyes held him rooted to the spot until the girl’s hand at his elbow guided him off the trail and into the broad-spreading branches of a fir tree. There, after a false step, he tumbled into the fragrant boughs.

Without willing it, he drew the girl after him. After that, for a full moment he remained half reclining, feeling the wild beating of the girl’s heart and listening for he scarcely knew what.

When he heard the sound he recognized it; a slow, soft-padded plump-plump, and he was relieved.

“The thing we have met on the trail,” he told himself, “was not a horned demon, but a giant moose.” That he had been utterly at a loss, and that the girl had directed their course in a safe and sensible manner, he also recognized.

After listening to the padded footsteps until they faded out into the silence of the night, he assisted the girl to her feet and whispered:

“You are not a real person. You come from a book. Your name is Alice, and we are having adventures in Wonderland.”

“I am real enough.” She laughed a low laugh. “My name is not Alice, but Berley Todd. I am five feet tall and I weigh ninety pounds. My favorite dish is blueberries with ice cream on top.” She laughed again.

“And that moose, I suppose, was quite an old friend.”

“I suppose not. But a moose will not harm you if you give him the right of way, which I suppose is fair enough since this is his forest.

“But come. We must be near the end of the island.”

Red did not ask, “How do you know this?” He merely followed on.

Scarcely a moment had passed when they came out upon a pebbly shore. And there, as he flashed his light about, he discovered a nondescript raft of spruce logs. Dragged half way up on the shore, it seemed for all its crudeness to be a rather substantial affair.

“I suppose,” he said in a low tone, “that this entire affair has been arranged. You knew the raft was here.”

Becoming suspicious, he flashed his light into a pair of very innocent-appearing blue eyes. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “you know why I have been carried away.”

“Don’t you?” The eyes opened wide.

“As I live, no.”

“Then you’ll have to ask some one else. It’s plain enough why they took me. Want my dad’s money. Expect my help in getting it. They’ll have no help from me!

“And now, Mister Man-who-don’t-know-why-he’s-here, let’s thank kind Providence for this raft which some summer fisherman left here, and shove off. Looks like we might go across with nothing more than wet feet. What luck!”

“And what do you think is on the other shore?”

“Cabins. Cabins and cottages, fireplaces, blankets, easy chairs, and things to eat; not so near, but not so far away, either.”

Red stared at her in silence. Did this girl speak from knowledge of the island, or was she romancing, bolstering up courage with dreams that might prove false?

He dared not ask. Putting his stout shoulders to work at shoving off the raft, he had it afloat at once. Then, after selecting a stout spruce pole and assisting the girl to a place beside him, he shoved away toward that other shore that, looming dark and distant, seemed to beckon and to whisper of “cabins and fireplaces, blankets, easy chairs, and things to eat.”

“Well,” he sighed, “thus far we get the breaks.”